‘PSNC brings new expertise and tools to the OPF membership’, explained Ed Fay, Executive Director of OPF. ‘They have developed dArceo, a long-term preservation system (http://dingo.psnc.pl/darceo/) which is already used by a number of institutions in Poland to preserve their digital content. As part of their membership contribution they will publicise the service as an open source package. In addition, PSNC will submit improvements to the FITS (http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/fits) code base, a tool which is widely used by both OPF members and the wider community’.

‘As we speak about long-term preservation, our long-term goal is to improve PSNC’s excellence in the field and share our expertise and tools with the preservation community’ said Tomasz Parkoła, long-term preservation specialist, and member of PSNC’s Digital Libraries Team. ‘We believe that OPF can help us bring this to reality, by providing an excellent collaboration and networking environment. We are especially looking forward to sharing knowledge, creating new initiatives, investigating new ideas and running new projects. Our main focus is obviously on research and development activities.”

The Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center is a public ICT research and development institution working on broad range of topics, including network, storage, computing, applications and network services. It has been active in the long-term preservation and archiving domain for several years.

PSNC becomes the 19th member of Open Planets joining libraries, archives, research institutions, universities, and service providers collaborating on shared approaches to digital preservation.

Candidates have been selected among 19 nominations world-wide. Succeed Awards will be delivered during the Digitisation Days (http://www.succeed-project.eu/digitisation-days), on the 20th of May in Madrid. The ceremony will be chaired by the President of the Fundación Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes and the Nobel-prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa. Many very relevant personalities of the digitisation field and high-level representatives of the European Commission and the Government have confirmed their participation.

On the 10th and 11th of April 2014, the Succeed project will hold a hackathon at the University of Alicante. Its aim is to look for ways of improving state-of-the-art open-source tools for digitisation of textual content such as books and newspapers.

Over two days, developers will work together in small groups to discuss, roadmap and plan the future development of existing tools. Some of the topics up for discussion are:

This hackathon provides a unique opportunity to meet developers involved in digitisation projects from all over Europe. The PSNC representative will take part in the workshop. Participation in the event is free of charge, but to ensure it, you should reserve your place. Participants are also encouraged to take a look at last year’s hackathon’s outcomes and background information.

We invite you to participate in the Digital Library Conference which will be held in Slovakia from 1st to 3rd of April, 2014. It is already 15th edition of this conference which will discuss various activities in the area of Europeana, advanced ICT technologies for digital libraries and guidelines for digitization projects. During the conference two presentations will be given by PSNC representatives. One of them )”Cultural Heritage Institutions, Metadata Aggregators and The Cloud”) will present various approaches for applying cloud technologies to digital libraries. The other one (“Succeed with us: recommendations for mass digitization projects”) will present the results of Succeed project in the context of recommendations elaborated within one of its work packages (WP4). We warmly invite you to get familiar with the conference programme (http://www.schk.sk/wordpress/digital-library-english/preliminary-agenda/) and register (http://www.schk.sk/wordpress/digital-library-english/registration/).

The first review of Succeed (Support Action Centre of Competence in Digitisation) took place over the last 24th and 25 February at the University of Alicante. It ended with a very positive assessment of the project development. Project has made an excellent progress in its first year, all deliverables has been accepted and it has exceeded expectations in some areas.

Succeed consortium members have participated during those days to submit the achievements and present the challenges for the coming year. Present during the meeting were: Rafael C. Carrasco, Project Coordinator; Isabel Martínez, Project Technical Manager; Ester Boldrini, Project Financial Manager; Clemens Neudecker, from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and WP2 coordinator; Katrien Depuydt, from the Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie and WP3 co-leader; Sebastian Kirch, from The Fraunhofer IAIS and WP3 co-leader; Tomasz Parkola, from the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center and WP4 leader; and also Christian Clausner, from the University of Salford and WP5 leader; Alicia Blaya, from the Biblioteca virtual Miguel de Cervantes and WP7 leader; Elisabeth Freyre, From The Bibliothèque nationale de France and GA member, and Aly Conteh, from the British Library, GA member.

The review took place on the last day of the meeting and it was carried out by Cristina Maier, Succeed Project Officer from the European Commission, and the EC Reviewers Derek Law and Patricia Mergen.

Due to Ddays and DATeCH2014 celebration, on 19th and 20th May, the headquarters of the BNE (National Library of Spain) in Madrid will become a meeting place for top international experts in digitisation. Among other participants, Michael Keller, from the Stanford University, Milagros del Corral, from UNESCO, Jill Cousins, from Europeana; Frank Frischmuth, from German Digital Library, Steven Krauwer, from Utrecht University, and Andrew Prescott, from King’s College London will take part in the conference. Program in full at http://succeed-project.eu/digitisation-days/schedule. Register here.

Two events coorganized by SCAPE project and OPF Events are coming soon. The first one is called ‘Preserving Your Preservation Tools’ and it will take place in the National Library of the Netherlands in Hague on 26th and 27th of March. This two-day training workshop is going to focus on preparing maintainable software packages, among others: core concepts and current practices for preparing such packages, covering important surrounding issues including documentation and licensing. Participants will get a hand-on experience of open source tools and services such as Vagrant, GitHub and Travis-CI. For more details about the event visit: http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/SP/SCAPE+Training+Event+-+Preserving+Your+Preservation+Tools. Registration is available here.

Second event is called ‘Managing Digital Preservation’ and is a one-day seminar which will take place in the National Library & Archives of the Netherlands in Hague on 2nd April. It will focus on the issues that managers face when implementing digital preservation in their organisations. It aims to bring together managers who have responsibility for digital preservation, but who are not necessarily technical experts in this area. It is an opportunity to get to know different strategic approaches to digital preservation and to meet peers and experts from across Europe. One of the guest speakers will be the PSNC’s representative. Details about the seminar can be found here.

Next schooling cycle of Polish e-learning courses „Digital repositories for small memory institutions” and „Introduction to Europeana” has begun on February 6th 2014. Courses are available by the e-learning part of Digital Libraries Federation. As it was before, this cycle will last 3 months from February until May. After successful finishing each of those free courses and fulfilling questionnaires at the end of each lesson, participants can receive electronic certificates (separate for each course).

“Digital repositories for small memory institutions” one was enriched with new examples of digital libraries and collections, the lesson about digitization equipment was expanded and also some practical hints about preparing objects to scanning were added. Changes mentioned above are a result of last schooling cycle users feedback, we hope that they will have a positive impact on courese quality.